Codify is a collaborative project by Alex Jackson, Imogen Minoli, and Seonaid McNabb .

No matter your background, learning to program requires discipline and dedication, along with the ability to evaluate your own errors, learn from your mistakes, and sift through massive amounts of information in order to find code solutions that work for your needs.

We designed Codify with our own experience as bootcamp students in mind, hoping to provide tools to facilitate some of the practical, organizational needs of programmers, as well as to provide spaces that encourage active learning.

In its current iteration, Codify has the following features:

A quiz that students can use to regularly test their knowledge of popular programming languages
An interactive whiteboard that can be used to visualize programming concepts, take, and save notes
A personalized, searchable Q&A feature that encourages students to document their own questions and answers throughout their learning process, which can be reviewed regularly
A searchable How-To blog where programmers can build a collection of their own instructions/tutorials related to coding tasks
A customizable work priorities list (particularly geared towards career-changers)

Technologies used

Front end:

React
React Router
React-icons
React Reveal for transitions
CSS / Chakra UI
Figma for design mock-up
Canva for logo
HTML5 Canvas for whiteboard
Roughjs, Perfect Freehand, React color, and Flaticon for drawing tools
Quiz API for quiz questions
Draft-js, DOMPurify, and html-react-parser for text editor
Jest
Enzyme

Backend:

MySQL
ExpressJS

Set up

Clone the repository
Run npm install to install packages

Start the back-end:

Navigate to your MySQL command line and run: mysql -u root -p create database codify
cd my-express-app
npm install
npm run migrate (only necessry the first time you run the project)
npm start

Start the front-end

cd .. to return to root
cd client
npm install
npm start

The app will run on http://localhost:3000 as the default port and the back-end will run on http://localhost:5001.

API keys

TODO: add description of API key set-up for QuizAPI

The API calls should now work as expected!

Notes About Testing

This project uses Jest and Enzyme for testing. Jest is a Javascript testing framework, and Enzyme helps to simplify test-writing.

Next steps

Ideas for how we'd like to develop the project include:

Adding a student and instructor log-in
Adding a public "classroom" area where students can share information and resources, and contribute to a collaborative cheat-sheet
A reflection blog area where students can regularly upload entries reflecting on what they've learned, what strategies worked for them, and set future learning goals
A coding resource collection where students can upload tutorials, videos, articles, and links to resources
An "unrelated" resources board, where students can upload articles, videos, etc. of concepts not directly related to programming, but which have deepened or expanded their understanding of the topic
Linking back-end tables with tags in order to facilitate a global search of all resources and student entries
An area to save frequently used code snippets and templates
More advanced styling and search methods